SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Architect's Guidebook

28

Individual and Social Networking Features

By Matt Ranlett

SharePoint 2010 is more than an organization's content repository, capable of storing and versioning web pages and documents with ease. It is also an organization's social butterfly, finding common interests between various employees and stitching together the contents of the various repositories across organizational boundaries.

The social aspect of SharePoint is one of the feature areas that received the most attention and investment from Microsoft during the evolution from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010. The capabilities of prior versions have been significantly augmented in this latest offering, and include a number of personalization and organization capabilities.

This chapter will first focus on ensuring that a common social computing vocabulary is established with respect to SharePoint's functionalities. Once a firm understanding of the various capabilities has been imparted, the second portion of this chapter will focus on the incorporation of SharePoint's social networking capabilities in enterprise portal applications.

FIGURE 28-1: User-centric identities

A social computing application is inherently built around individual users. When considering a user-centric design approach, it is helpful to think of an individual's various identities. At every moment, each user thinks of himself or herself as having three ...